


Hoist the Colours

by eldritcher



Series: Pandemic [8]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child - Thorne & Rowling
Genre: Family, Fluff and Humor, Gen, Slice of Life, parenting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-11
Updated: 2021-03-11
Packaged: 2021-03-17 19:20:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29971104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eldritcher/pseuds/eldritcher
Summary: Narcissa's grand plan to end the war is to make Voldemort retire by giving him a child to worry about. Her plan works too well. Bellatrix is left to do damage control as Voldemort takes to parenting.
Relationships: Bellatrix Black Lestrange & Narcissa Black Malfoy, Bellatrix Black Lestrange & Tom Riddle | Voldemort, Delphi & Bellatrix Black Lestrange, Delphi & Tom Riddle | Voldemort
Series: Pandemic [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2137872
Kudos: 10





	Hoist the Colours

_1995_

  
"A child?" 

Voldemort was a fish out of the water when it came to matters familial. I scowled at this folly my stupid sister had twisted my arm into. 

The war needed to end, Narcissa held. And to end it, she needed Voldemort out of the way, sane and _retired_. A child, she believed, constituted the key to this fortuitous outcome. If he had a child, he would not risk the child being orphaned. 

"A child," I repeated. 

"Very well," Voldemort replied, after a few long moments of contemplation. "You had best cease field activities, when you are with child." 

I had expected him to protest. I had anticipated that he would ask me to wait to embark on this folly after the war was done. I ought to have known better. His sanity extended for longer spells these days. Perhaps I should worry about what means he had chosen to restore his mind, but I could not bring myself to. His insanity had cost us everything once. Narcissa believed a child would propel him to remain sane. 

"Rodolphus was castrated in Azkaban," I told him.

He stared at me, puzzled. While he and I were not unused to sharing confidences during his saner spells, I had never once spoken to him of my private affairs. 

All the male prisoners of Azkaban were castrated. A Ministry policy dating back to medieval times. Evildoers must not spawn. In our circles, it was not uncommon to impregnate women with potions brewed of another man's seed. 

"It shall have to be the potion," Voldemort said cautiously.

He was on territory he did not know to navigate. Where once he might have charged ahead, he had learned a measure of circumspection in his long years of wandering as a spirit. 

I waited. 

He was not slow, but I had dragged him into a conversation well out of his depth. 

"Bella, I cannot," he said flatly, averting his gaze. His fingers clenched about the edge of the table. 

Not unaffected then.

My sister, my foolish and brilliant sister, had been right. Oh, he did not want a child, any more than he wanted a familiar. He wanted purpose, and it had eluded him since 1981, since Abraxas's death. 

"I have matters to see to," he said, rising to leave.

Did he think I would withdraw when I had scented blood in the water? 

"Have I told you what I endured in your name?" I called after him. 

He halted.

Other women would not have broached the subject. I knew I must. His guilt over my incarceration of more than a decade festered between us, ripe to be exploited towards my ends. 

I rose to my feet and went to him. 

"Have I regaled you with tales of what they did to me?"

He swallowed, shaking his head, refusing to meet my gaze. We had known each other for nearly forty years, and his bloody naivety when it came to what men did to women remained. I had no wish to tell him. There was little sacred in this world, and his ignorance remained a charming constant. In sanity or in insanity, he had never brooked sexual sport in our ranks. 

"I shall spare you the details, Voldemort."

He knew what I sought as barter for my silence.

"Draco," he began. 

"Draco is my nephew. I am not brewing a pregnancy potion from his seed." 

The Blacks had not minded a touch of incest, but Narcissa was dead set against the perpetuation of it after what she had learned about the Gaunts. 

I had an element of self-interest in this. I had no sexual draw to Voldemort. However, his magic was startlingly lovely in its sweep of mourning's evergreen. A child born of him would be remarkable. 

"It shall be inadequate," he said finally. 

He feared that his madness might be inheritable. His family history was his weakness, Narcissa said. She was certain that he would not allow the child to be orphaned, or to be abandoned, or to be fathered by a madman. 

"Your insanity was of your make," I told him, blunt in speech as I ever had been in his presence when it was merely the two of us. 

"It shall burden the child to know-" he trailed off, falling into a brown study.

"The child will be raised as a Lestrange. She will be of my husband's family," I reminded him.

It gave me no joy to withhold the child from him, but Narcissa had insisted that he must come to define his involvement in this affair on his own. He was flighty when it pertained to obligations he had not chosen. 

\------

He brewed the potion. 

"How can I be sure that it is yours?" I demanded. 

I knew it must be. His deceits, when he employed them, were not over matters as this. 

He did not grace me with a reply. 

Then emotion caught me in its unwieldy clutch, as I looked at the man who had taught me all I knew, at the man who had saved my sister when she had been a child of ten trapped in a home of the blues where our father had killed our mother.

"Great measures you have gone to, so that you may not hear of what I endured in your name," I said bitterly.

I had endured.

He looked up from where he had been sieving gold from soil. In sanity and in madness, he had not allowed anyone else to assist him in alchemical pursuits. There were none who could have aided him, I mused, looking about at the assorted array of Muggle laboratory equipment interspersed with Wizarding tools he favoured. 

"I cannot claim to fathom why you are set upon this course, Bella," he said quietly. 

He had not been one for small talk. Thirteen years of wandering had not improved him in this aspect. Without Abraxas to soften him in company, he was haplessly lost in navigating fraught conversations. 

I decided to take my leave before it came to an impasse, or worse, a duel. Narcissa turned displeased whenever we ruined the walls and the carpets with scorch marks. 

\------

"Cheers!" I raised the vial to Narcissa. 

She winked at me, happy as a clam. The pulse in her throat was throbbing. She put on a brave and carefree face, but she was terrified. 

I paused. 

"There is a history of postpartum depression in our family," she said softly.

She had suffered after Draco's birth, for a few weeks, before she had been given other reasons to suffer, after Godric's Hollow. Our mother had been a shadow of herself after giving birth to us. 

Narcissa worried for me. Azkaban had done my mental health no favours. 

" _His_ mental health is a mightier concern at the moment. I shall grin and bear this, if it comes to that," I reassured my sister. 

\-----

Narcissa came to us, flushed from exertion. She must have run from the gardens in haste to the breakfast parlor. 

"The hawthorns have bloomed!"

The hawthorns had not bloomed since 1981. 

They had been raised by magic, in the 1960s, when Narcissa had come to live at the Manor as a foster-child. 

Dromeda had run away. I had been sent to school. Narcissa had remained behind, a child of five, when our father had killed our mother. His temper had taken a turn for the dark afterwards, and there had been nobody to shield my sister. Once, she had reacted in wild magic's outburst, and it had killed our father. The House Elf, furious and grieving, had turned to kill her. 

Voldemort had saved her, and brought her here, to this sanctuary that Abraxas held for him. From her happiness, the first hawthorn had bloomed in these gardens. 

_For it is hawthorn that heals the broken heart_ , our mother had told us often. 

I placed my hand over my womb, knowing that I was with child.

\-------

"What will be her name?"

Narcissa cleared her throat and went to Voldemort's side, tiptoeing up to whisper into his ear about the faux-pas he had committed. 

In Wizarding families, we did not cast gender revealing charms until the first trimester of pregnancy was complete, given the high rate of miscarriage in our society. 

How would Voldemort know that, without Abraxas to steer him through our customs and ways? 

"You shan't have a miscarriage," he reassured me stiltedly. 

Narcissa bit her lip in vexation. I sat down and buried my head in my hands, laughing until I wept. 

"Are you disappointed that I knew before you did?"

"You must not cast gender revealing charms on pregnant women without their say-so," Narcissa said mildly. "It is poor form." 

He opened his mouth to speak, but thought better of it, scrutinizing me with curiosity. He was not one for self-preservation. The only matter on which he betrayed an amount of caution was when it came to discussing the quirks of his magic. It was as mourning's evergreen, in its velveteen spread, and had never needed a wand to channel. His magic had instinctively sought the child, taking direction from his contemplation on the subject.

"Now we know that the child has magic," Narcissa said brightly, striving to see the good in the situation. 

"Carry your wand with you," I warned Voldemort. 

Thirteen years of wandering had not aided his subterfuge. He had begun to slip in his facade since his return. Many had begun to take notice that he was given to performing complex magic wandlessly. 

"You were more circumspect in criticizing me once," he muttered, returning to his reading. 

That had been before he had unilaterally decided that killing a babe in a cradle on the basis of prophecy was sound strategy. That had been before thirteen years in Azkaban. That had been before I had agreed to carry out Narcissa's foolhardy plan to tether him to home and hearth away from war by giving him a child. 

" _The Tales of Beedle the Bard_ ," Narcissa read the cover of the book he was immersed in. "Our mother used to read this to us when we were children."

"Did she now?" he said absently, scribbling notes and equations on a scrap of parchment he had at hand. 

Was he planning to read nursery tales to the child? I exchanged a hapless glance with Narcissa. 

"Delphini," I told them. "I shall name the child Delphini." 

Rodolphus and I had spent our last night together under the stars of the constellation of Delphinus, before we had been taken captive and sent to Azkaban. 

Narcissa had been a melancholy child, prone to bouts of crippling depression in the winters. Voldemort had resorted to pressing summer's last flowers: _delphinium_ , and sending them to her at Hogwarts. They had brightened her days in the long Scottish winter. 

There were rumors in the ranks that Abraxas had married Voldemort in the 1940s, on the cracked stones in the ruins of the ancient temple of Delphi, with only the stars standing watch, amidst oleander fumes, upon the navel of the ancient world as determined by the pagan god Zeus. 

And when Voldemort had come to save me from Azkaban, the sole stars upon the skies that night had been the constellation of Delphinus. 

I did not hold with omens and prophecies. This child, I knew instinctively, meant _fate_. She would be Voldemort's fate. She would be my family's fate. 

* * *

_1996_

"You are ill," Voldemort said bluntly, perching at the side of my bed, placing a hand lightly on mine. 

He had shed his ways as a snake, shifting from reserve to candor. For the child's sake. 

Narcissa had been right. There was little he would not do for the child. 

"You cannot take her from me," I replied. My wand was in reach. 

Lily Potter had protected her boy. I was a witch more powerful than the dead Potter wife.

"Let me care for her until your health improves," he bartered. 

Postpartum depression had seized me in its vice grip. I loved and loathed the child. I struggled to keep myself composed. My moods fluctuated wild. My health was in pisspoor shape. Thirteen years in Azkaban and two wars did not augur well for the arduousness of childbirth. 

"What do you know of the care of babes?" I muttered. "The House Elves can manage, Voldemort." 

The last babe he had been in close proximity to, he had endeavored to kill in the name of a prophecy. 

Narcissa, watching us quietly, then intervened. "Bella."

I exhaled. Her masterplan required him coming to bind himself willingly and irrevocably to the child as father. It had not mattered before the girl had been born of me in flesh and blood. Now I did not wish to see her gone from me, even for a moment's parting. 

Rodolphus had his hands full with my care. 

Narcissa was occupied trying to put a government into place after the Wall had been raised on the Anglo-Scottish line, after the Christmas Tuesday Accord that had ended our war by dividing the country into two. 

Voldemort had taken himself to Swanage, to a cottage by the sea. He had stayed sane. He had given up war and ambition. He would not risk the child being orphaned or employed as a pawn in war. 

Delphini was a Lestrange. Narcissa had convinced Voldemort that to associate the child to him would only paint a target on her back. 

Delphini began crying in her cradle. Wearied, I looked to Narcissa. Before she could attend to the child, Voldemort strode across, to take the child neatly into his arms. He held the babe better than Rodolphus did. 

"I have been reading," he explained, noticing my bafflement.

I sighed. 

"Once I recover, she returns to me," I told him. 

"As you wish," he said, not even looking at me. His eyes were full of reverent awe as he watched the babe play with his fingers. 

After he had left, I turned to Narcissa. She was wide-eyed in astonishment. 

"I think your damned plan has worked too well," I informed her. "If he steals my child as Rumpelstiltskin-"

"No, no, he won't," she hastily assured me, though she looked doubtful. 

"Narcissa-"

"Don't worry," she mustered. "He shall not want Delphini raised without a family." 

He was an orphan. He would not burn bridges with us and steal the child, lest he fall, leaving the girl to the mercy of others.

He had shed his ways as a snake. He had set aside selfish impulse for the greater good, for Delphini's good. 

* * *

  
_1999_

It happened at her third birthday party, hosted in the little Cotswolds cottage Rodolphus and I lived in. 

A garden snake, young and harmless. 

Delphini came to me, with the snake about her wrist, grinning and hissing at her new friend. 

Scorpius gasped. 

"You are talking to the snake!" he accused her. 

Delphini screamed then. The snake, frightened, plopped off her hand, and vanished as a swift streak in the grass. 

\----------

"You have to tell her," Narcissa insisted, pulling me behind a hedge, peering at where Draco was comforting the scared children.  
  
I had not told the girl about her parentage. She called Rodolphus Dad. 

Voldemort visited as clockwork, every Saturday for tea, and took an uncanny interest in her development. He had contrived to be there when she had taken her first step. He had contrived to be there she had spoken her first word. He had shamelessly plied her with toys that had swift become her favourites. 

However, despite his attachment, he had not naysaid me when I had told him of my decision to obscure the matter of her parentage from her. 

\-------

"Is it evil?" Delphini asked me that night, eyes full of tears, frightened. "I didn't know that I was talking in snake language. It just happened, Mum. I didn't mean to. Mum-" 

Rodolphus put his foot down with a telling glare. Not one for words, my Rodolphus. The truth will out, he had warned me many a time. 

"Mum." 

She clung to me, weeping, scared, apologizing for something she did not understand. 

\-----

Swanage was sunny and warm. There were beds of lavender and delphinium surrounding the house. Trellises of hawthorn decked the windows. A giant ash tree cast its shadow upon us as we walked to the front-door.

"Is this where you live?" Delphini demanded brightly, when Voldemort let us in. "Oh, Mum! You can see the ocean from here!" 

"It is a bay," Voldemort corrected her, lifting her to the windows in his kitchen that overlooked the cliffs and the coast. "A bay, Delphini, is a recessed, coastal body of water, connected to the ocean. It makes an excellent location for ports, since it is sheltered from the winds."

I wondered what Delphini understood of that. He had never taken the effort to speak to her as one speaks to a child. 

"Recessed?" 

"As a hole," he replied. "From _recessus_ in Latin, Delphini."

Settling her in the kitchen with biscuits, we moved to the parlor. 

"You have not brought the child here before," he remarked. 

"She conversed with a garden snake at her birthday party."

"Ah." 

Happiness flickered in his gaze naked for a moment, before he hastily turned away to mask the raw expression. 

Harry Potter, we had heard, had lost the ability to converse in the tongue of the snakes after the horcrux had been undone.

Voldemort had been the last one left. Perhaps he had hoped that Delphini might have inherited the gift from him, for to him gift it was despite the world's revilement. He had not spoken the tongue frequently before others, but during Abraxas's lifetime, he had often sung to Abraxas in that strange language, during their walks together through the arbor of ash in the grounds of Abraxas's estate. 

"What should I tell her?" he asked carefully. 

The truth will out, Rodolphus had warned me. Delphini was three. She had spoken to snakes. She had wept all night, promising me that she had not meant to, that she did not understand why it had happened, and had been frightened that Scorpius would not speak to her again. 

"Bella-" He threw out an arm to steady himself against the bookcase. "I cannot."

He was afraid Delphini would be terrified if he told her the truth. Terrified of him. Ashamed of her parentage. He would rather settle for Saturday teas and their current dynamic of mutual fondness than risk excommunication from her presence. 

I thawed, upon seeing his wretched state. 

"She doesn't take after any of us, thank goodness. She is a forgiving child, Voldemort."

Narcissa and Draco had offered to explain the truth to Delphini. I had declined. Voldemort had a way about him that settled the child. I suspected that it was his magic speaking instinctively to her in the ways he could not. 

He walked to the kitchen as a man to gallows. I trailed after him, hoping that I had not made an irreversible mistake. 

"This is about the snake, isn't it?" Delphini asked in a small voice, crumbling the biscuit in nervousness. "I didn't mean it."

"I know," Voldemort replied, sitting beside her. "The language of snakes is called Parseltongue. It is an inherited gift, and those who speak it are called Parselmouths."

"Inherited?" 

The girl had inherited his curiosity. 

"From parent to child," he explained.

"Mum and Dad don't speak to snakes," Delphini noted, putting her biscuit down, peering at the crumbs on her fingers. 

Her little hands were shaking. Voldemort's magic rose to her involuntarily to undo her upset, in sweet comfort's embrace. She leaned against him, in the unconscious way children seek touch to be reassured. He was clumsy in interpersonal interactions, but he brought his hand about her loosely, giving her the tactility she sought.

My father had been a cruel man. He had hated my mother for giving him only daughters. Dromeda had run away. Narcissa had seen the worst of his cruelties. My younger sister had been sweet-tempered and loving as a child. She had sought my father in the way children do. He had taught her to mend her ways, by throwing the Cruciatus on her whenever she dared creep to his side to be held or soothed.

Voldemort must have seen my reflex reaction to go to them, to take Delphini into my arms. 

"I was born in an orphanage," he told Delphini. 

"An orphanage?"

"If your parents are dead, or if they don't want you, that is where they send you," he replied. 

Her face fell in shock. She reached out to clasp his hand in her plump, tiny ones. 

"I am sorry," she said earnestly, eyes brimming with tears of pity. 

"It was a long time ago, Delphini. I spoke to a garden snake on a Christmas Eve, when I had been a boy of three."

She fell silent, her bright mind making the connections swift. Her gaze was fixed on him, pleading. 

"They did not like it."

"What did they do?" she asked in a hushed voice, knowing with the unerring instinct of children that he had been punished for it. 

Before his fall in 1981, I had often noticed the scarring of electrodes at his neck and wrists. Electroconvulsion therapy, I had heard as rumors in the ranks. They had tried to exorcise him with means of holy water and electricity. 

"It does not matter now," he promised. "Your father was not well, after Azkaban. Your mum wanted you very much. So I helped her with a potion."

"And I got the Parseltongue from you," Delphini said softly, flipping his hand, tracing her index finger over his wrist, where once there had been scarring from electrodes. 

"You must not use it unless you are with me," he cautioned. "It is not-" He looked at me wryly. "It is not evil, but it is a rare gift. What we cannot understand, we fear."

"I don't want anyone to be afraid of me," Delphini said fervently. "Or to hate me."

"What did the garden snake tell you?"

"That I had cake on my nose." 

"That does not seem very evil now, does it?" 

She shook her head, relieved. 

"It is only a language, Delphini."

"Like French?" 

"Indeed."

She cheered up at that, and said happily, "It can be our secret language now!" 

That startled a laugh from him. They looked at me, one no longer afraid, and the other incandescent in hope's yearning. 

"Hiss at each other all you like," I told them, suppressing a grin. "I have errands to run. Bring her home when you are done." 

Delphini whooped and began a victory dance about the kitchen table. Voldemort stared at her, perplexed and content. Then he came to escort me to the door. 

"Thank you, Bella."

He meant it. I thawed. _For it is hawthorn that heals the broken heart_.

"Perhaps it shan't be ill-advised were we to bring her to Swanage more," I told him, mustering gentleness that was alien to me.

\-------

"Narcissa?" 

"Yes, dearest sister?" 

"He loves Delphini."

They had often said that Voldemort lacked the capacity to love. Love had undone him long before Godric's Hollow. He had bound himself to Abraxas Malfoy, and that love had carried us into two wars and cost him his sanity once. 

I began to fear what his love for Delphini might wreak on us. 

* * *

_2001_

"What can I call him, Mum?" Delphini asked, trailing after me on the high-street. 

Narcissa had nipped into one of the shops, claiming she would be back in a jiffy, and we had not seen a trace of her since. 

Delphini had begun making pointed hints about the ice-cream parlor, hoping that I might settle in there while we waited for Narcissa to return. 

What could she call him? I sighed. 

Ice-cream it was then.

I loathed ice-cream, but Delphini insisted that vanilla would be the flavor that converted me. 

Vanilla. I was Bellatrix Lestrange. There was nothing vanilla about me. 

I pushed across my scoop of vanilla to her. 

"Mum! Try it!"

"I would rather eat frogs alive."

"Mum!"

She looked about, hoping that nobody had overheard my proclamation, threw me a censorious glare, and stole my ice-cream for good measure. 

Then she giggled. She was a good sport. However had she been born of us? 

"Did you ask him?" 

"He said I should ask you, Mum." 

I resisted the urge to groan. 

Voldemort had shamelessly waged a campaign to get her to adore him, baking her pastries and toffees and all manner of cakes. I worried for the girl's teeth. Oh, well, she would lose this set soon. I would have to ban him from plying her with sweets once her new teeth grew in. 

He did not need to exert himself, I could have told him, were the bloody-minded man to listen. Delphini trusted his magic. She hearkened to it, in a way she did not react to Rodolphus's magic or mine. 

"He is lonely, isn't he?" Delphini asked quietly. "I have Dad and you. Aunt Narcissa has Draco and Scorpius. He doesn't have anyone." 

The inconvenient perspicacity of children. 

"The garden snakes of Swanage told me that he often sits beneath the ash tree, through day and night, silent as if he is not really there."

Ash had been Abraxas's wand-wood. There was a grove of ash trees at Malfoy Manor, planted for Abraxas by his father. 

"What do the garden snakes tell you about the hawthorn?" 

She stared at me in avid curiosity. I waited her out. She was not given to patience. 

"They said that he is afraid to touch the flowers," she confided softly.

He watched himself, every word and gesture, when he was in Delphini's company. He was loathe to frighten her. 

\---------

"What should I call you?" Delphini asked him, the next time I took her to Swanage.

 _A horse with no name_ was a song Narcissa liked to play on winter nights. She had once told me that it reminded her of the early years of her acquaintance with Voldemort, when she had not known his name. 

I sipped at my tea, ignoring how he looked to me for an intervention. 

"It is your decision, Delphini," he said finally. 

Delphini nodded. Sombre, all of five, she offered him her hand to shake.

"May I call you Papa?"

I looked away as his composure fell. Delphini, bless the sweet child, was desperately prattling on about cake and biscuits, trying to cheer him up. 

"I am not unhappy," he told her frankly. "I am the happiest I have been."

"You don't look happy," she pointed out. "Mum-"

Then she ceased speaking, as his magic came to embrace her, followed swift by his arms. 

"You have never done that before!" she exclaimed, giggling, as he lifted her up and pressed a kiss to her bonny cheek.

"Papa!" she grinned and kissed his cheek in turn. 

I had watched him mourn Abraxas. I had seen him in war and defeat. I had seen him in insanity's clutches. Shattered, he stood in his kitchen, holding Delphini, stilted and frightened and yearning.

_For it is hawthorn that heals the broken heart._

\-----

"Why did you ask me for the potion?" he demanded that night, following me to the gardens, where I had been inspecting the hawthorn blossoms. 

He had carried her into a room that had been readied for her, even if the girl had not spent the night at Swanage before. Had he prepared the room hoping that one day she might stay? He had read her to sleep. 

"You wished to defang me," he went on bitterly. "You knew that I would give up war and ambition for a child."

"I wished to save you," I retorted, exhausted of strategy and folly. 

Daring, I gripped his elbow. He shook me off, disgruntled, never one to brook touch easily. 

"I watched you unravel yourself into insanity. I went to Azkaban for you." 

"Bella-" 

He sighed and drew closer, and this time when I caught his elbow he did not pull away. 

"You have power over me," he said crossly. "Must you remind me of it at every turn?" 

The power of a mother. It had undone him once before, when Lily Potter had stood between him and her baby. He wanted Delphini to love him. Delphini was mine, or so he thought, and he feared I might turn her against him. 

He was not as my father had been. 

James Potter, I had heard, had stood between Voldemort and his child. Voldemort would gladly die for Delphini, if it came to that. 

"Weekends," I told him.  
  
Eyes full of disbelief, magic singing in joy, he turned to me. 

"She can stay with you on the weekends," I promised. 

"You trust me with your child," he breathed. 

"I trust you with _your_ child."

\--------

"How goes your grand coparenting adventure?" my wicked sister of the west asked me.

I scowled at her. For good measure, I sent a tickling hex at her. She evaded it as the graceful gremlin she had grown up to be. 

"He has no idea what he is doing," I told her. 

She smiled fondly at that. He had raised her, in all but name. She had no inclination towards sex or romance. I shuddered to think what another parent might have made of her, marrying her off to an old family as a broodmare. 

Voldemort had brokered her marriage to Lucius. Lucius had a mistress in Ireland and had never made demands of Narcissa. After the war, he had taken himself to Belfast, and Narcissa remained in this old manor. 

"I daresay you may have turned out normal had he not raised you," I muttered.

"I am the normal one, Bella. Dromeda ran away at fifteen with a boy to Bethnal Green. You throw the Cruciatus on houseplants."

She had a point. 

"House Elves?" I leered at her. 

She made a distasteful face and grumbled, "For the last time, Bella! I have no interest in-" She waved her hand in all-encompassing explanation. 

I did not understand her preference. 

She was content in her solitude. I let her be.

* * *

_2019_

Narcissa's face showed up in our Floo. 

"Cissy, is everything all right?" Rodolphus queried, seeing her anxiety. 

"Voldemort showed up," she said. 

He had taken a trip to China in the middle of November, saying something about Ming Pottery. 

Ming Pottery? As if he had the slightest knowledge of pottery! I had sent spies to trail him, lest he find trouble. Recalcitrant quarry that he could be, he had shaken them off and ventured on.

Narcissa often said that Snape could not give up his old job of saving Harry Potter, even if Potter was a man in his late thirties. I could not refrain from acting to protect Voldemort. He had never been one to temper power and brilliance with sense. 

Delphini had grounded him. We had had two decades of peace. 

"There is a virus. In Wuhan," Narcissa said quizzically. "He was worried."

Abraxas Malfoy had nearly died of polio in the early 1940s. Voldemort had saved him in a foolhardy gambit, binding himself to the dying soul as House Elves were bound to a household, as slaves were bound to masters. He had sustained Abraxas for years afterwards from breath to breath with his magic. The unprecedented nature of their bond had not done Voldemort's sanity any favours. Paranoid as he had become, enmeshed in war, he had split his magic into containers so that Abraxas may have access to it even if he died. _Magic is the soul, as the soul is magic_ ; he had not heeded that lesson. His soul had splintered, and with it, his sanity too. 

He might have been restored to sanity, but he was paranoid when it came to epidemics that crossed from the Muggle world to ours. Delphini had become a healer. That had manifold amplified his paranoia about epidemics.

"Bella, will you go to him?" Narcissa implored. "He was in quite the state when he left." 

\--------

I found him under the ash tree at Swanage, slumped against its bole, head in his hands. Soothing the disconsolate was Delphini's forte. She was not present. We would have to make do. 

"Wuhan?"

He did not reply. 

There was only one way I knew to get him to talk. 

"Crucio!" 

He fumbled away at the last second, and stared at me in bloody incomprehension. 

"Crucio," I clarified helpfully, throwing the curse again. 

He did not have his wand with him. He had fallen out of the habit of carrying it on him after the war. His magic rose under his command, mighty and startlingly lovely, in its sweep of yew's evergreen. 

My next curse rippled through his defenses, even if they held. Hawthorn bloomed bright white upon the green. _Storge_ , they said, was a man's love for his family. Hawthorn was the flower of _storge_. 

"You have turned soft in your dotage," I taunted him, spinning into the duel, laughing ecstatic on adrenaline's high when he met me with curse and spell's crackling light. 

He would not harm me. His maneuvers were defensive, with the occasional retaliation. I dragged him out, curse by curse, until his sensibility fell. Not for nothing did they call me the finest duelist of our times. What I had not in power or skill, I compensated with strategy. 

Nobody expected a woman to be strategic. This belief had cost many their lives. Sirius had fallen into a veil, because he did not think he could be bested by his trollop of a cousin. 

Voldemort knew me too well to be fall for my taunting, and did not show an iota of emotion when I cast upon him curses designed to mock him. 

"We could do this all night," I called out to him. "Or you could tell me what ails you."

"Let us do this all night," he shouted back, and flung a cutting curse at my hair. 

"Not the hair!" I yelled, swerving away in the nick of time, repaying him with another Cruciatus. 

Then I saw my opening. The velveteen membrane of his magic's sweep shielded him from all, impervious and impenetrable. Yet, the hawthorn that bloomed upon it was spun of delicacy and vulnerability. Love had undone him, time and time again. I directed my magic there, to that place of weakness he wore, and shouted "Legilimens!" 

He cut me out near instantly, but I saw the kernel of the fear that had beset him.

Stricken, I dropped my wand. 

"You should have let it be," he chastised me, sweating, breathing fast after the exertion of our duel. 

"She is my daughter too!" 

"I know, Bella," he said hastily. "I meant to resolve the matter with none the wiser." 

"The Castle has chosen her as the next Headmaster!" I shouted. "How do you mean to resolve this?" 

The Castle was a sentient beast that centuries of Headmasters had wedded and placated. She chose them for their power. When she found someone worthy, she would kill off the previous Headmaster and court the next. In life, she was theirs. In death, she ate their magic. A magical castle needed magic as sustenance. It was the way of things. I had never cared about the morality of it. Now I cared. I cared deeply. The sentient beast had chosen my _daughter_. 

"What were you planning to do? She is not even twenty-five, Voldemort! She has not _lived_. She cannot marry a damned Castle!"

He did not reply.

"Did you mean to beg Dumbledore?" I jeered at him. "Did you mean to beg _Snivellus_ to take her place?" 

"If need be," he said, without betraying a speck of revulsion. "If need be, Bella." 

I pressed a palm to my head, feeling queasy and faint. He hastily made his way over to grab me by the arm and to lead us inside. 

"Perhaps a spot of tea?" he suggested, ushering me to the kitchen, fussing about with the teapot. 

"I shall break the teapot over your head," I warned him. 

Sighing, he came to sit beside me. 

"This is your fault," I accused him. 

Generations of perfectly disreputable Blacks had managed to survive without getting chosen by a sentient castle as its next spouse. 

"What is the name of that spider which eats its lovers?" 

"Black widow," he replied.

"The Castle is a Black Widow. Eating the magic of headmasters. Seeking a new one before the current Headmaster has died! No fealty! Treacherous whore. I will raze it to the ground, stone and beam, if it dares to draw my daughter into its deathtrap!"

He did not reply. His fingers were unnaturally still. In sanity, in madness, his fingers had been the most expressive part of him, ever fiddling with this or that. 

"What do you mean to do?" I asked him warily, reining in my wrath to unearth his schemes. 

"I gave you the potion because you asked," he said, contrary thing that he was, leaping neatly to a question I had not known to ask for twenty-five years. 

"You gave me the potion since you had no wish to hear of Azkaban," I spat, old bitterness rising anew from its makeshift grave.

His gaze was flaying as it caught mine. 

"Voldemort-"

"I was born of a potion, Bella, of visceral obsession and spite," he said quietly. "I would rather wander thirteen years without sanity, dispossessed, than father a child reviled and cast out."

I knew that. Narcissa and I had known that. We had known that he would give up war and ambition, that he would anchor himself to sanity, to prevent such an outcome. 

"You endured thirteen years in my name," he whispered. "I had vowed to myself that I would not sire a child. I broke that oath for you, Bella."

Stricken, I blinked back tears fiercely. _Storge_ , I knew, was the love of a man for his family. 

"My mother sold herself on the streets, when she was pregnant, for coin and shelter and food, so that she might carry me to term. The matron at the orphanage told me of what my mother had done, and reviled me for it. I have no desire to hear of Azkaban," he went on unsteadily, words coming to him clumsy and tactless. "If you had wished it of me, I would have listened two decades ago. If you wished it of me, I would listen now."

His story was not unknown to us who had fought for him. He had shied away from it nevertheless, neither denying nor confirming the rumors that had spread as wildfire in the seventies during the high halcyon days of our cause. 

Narcissa had wagered all on this, that he would not stand to see his child suffer as he had.

"You have become a dotard in your old age," I mocked him, meaning not a word of it, for I did not know what else to say. 

"Hawthorn bloomed on my magic for the first time in 1961, when I met Narcissa." There was no regret in his tone. _It is. It is. It is_ , my mother had often said stoically, when I had railed at her fate in that house of the blues. 

He was sincere, I knew, when he said that he would listen to me if I wished to tell him of Azkaban. 

Abraxas had protected him from the ways of the world, shielding from his ears tales of what cruel men did to their wives or mistresses or serving wenches. He had not heard of the Nott bastard born from House Elf and the master of the house. He had not heard of the Rosier girl who had been married to a sadist. He had not heard of the distaff Lestranges and their long history of killing the Obscurial bastards they begat on their sisters or cousins. He had not heard of our father's cruelty, and of how he had broken our mother's spine when she had given him a daughter for the third time, of how he had locked her up and broken her wand, of how he had Noxy, our House Elf, kill her when he set his eyes on another woman. Abraxas had protected him from the course of human things. 

And then I had another epiphany, of what he meant to undertake. 

"You mean to beg the Castle to take you in Delphini's stead," I breathed, rising to my feet in horror. 

He had given enough. He had bonded himself to Abraxas Malfoy when he had been a boy of fourteen, in a bid to save his beloved's life. The decision had unravelled his mind and magic and soul, and had dragged him into two wars, and to Godric's Hollow.

Narcissa had healed the horcrux in the Potter boy's scar by sacrificing her magic. Hers the hawthorn that had mended. Voldemort had floundered ashore to sanity after that, and Delphini had grounded him further. The past two decades had been the happiest he had known, even if his magic was draped heavy with mourning's verdure. 

"I had a choice," he said quietly. 

He had a choice. He could have let Abraxas die. 

"You were a boy! You were a boy and Abraxas had been the only one who had seen the humanity in you," I spat. "There was no choice, Voldemort. He was all that you had." 

He had anchored himself to Abraxas with slavery's bond. Abraxas had held the reins of his magic, until his death, even if Abraxas had never once commanded obedience of him. 

"Delphini did not choose this, Bella." 

No, she had not. She was my daughter. I had endured thirteen years in Azkaban. Delphini was Narcissa's niece. My sister's was the hawthorn that had restored Voldemort to sanity. 

"She will not allow you to go in her stead," I told him. "She loves you."

He flinched as if I had struck him. 

All these years that Delphini had loved him, in word and deed, in bright laughter and in careless affection, and he doubted his place in her heart.

There was a rap at the door. I went to answer it, leaving Voldemort to restore himself to composure.

Delphini rushed in, bright-eyed and ebullient as she ever was, despite the arduous nature of her work. 

"Mum! I hoped you were here!" she said, hugging me. "Papa came back from Wuhan, bearing news of a pandemic. I must admit that St. Mungo's does not think that he is right. However, we are worried about the nature of the outbreak. There are unverified reports from the Chinese Ministry that the virus eats the magic of the affected wizards."

Magic was our immunity. If the virus ate our magic, it was a death sentence.

"What is it called?"

"Coronavirus," she said. "Don't worry about it, Mum! We have hoisted the colours at the hospital. No virus shall take our realm while the valiant healers of St. Mungo's stand guard!"

"I see that you are running the hospital as a pirate-ship now," I teased her, taking comfort in her customary lightness of spirit. 

What did the Castle want with her? She was content here, saving our people from magical maladies, healing and mending, cheerful and compassionate. 

Perhaps Voldemort was right to seek to go in her stead. I feared, however, that he would be poorly equipped for it. He was startlingly naive, shielded from the ugliness of the lives of others, first by Abraxas and then by Narcissa. Delphini was not naive. 

"How is he?" She asked softly, perspicuous by nature, and attuned to Voldemort's psyche. "The epidemic worried him." 

"He insists on calling it a pandemic," I reminded her. 

"There is something else, isn't there, Mum?" she urged, concerned. "I have never seen him so...fraught." 

"I am here, Delphini," he called to her from the kitchen. "Do desist gossiping about me under my roof."

"Papa, speaking of your roof, you have a few loose tiles," she shouted back, laughing. Patting my arm, she went to him. 

She was needling him back to good humor. I listened to their soft voices and laughter. Sighing, I left the house, knowing that she would see to him. 

As I made to Apparate away, a cold wind blew from the north, bitter and unrelenting, sentient as old magic of stone and sacrifice was, and hawthorn blossoms came flying askew to fall at my feet. I leaned against the door and looked up at the obscured skies. Only the stars of the constellation of Delphinus remained visible in the cloudy vista.

Delphini's tuneless singing came wafting through the open windows. 

_The King and his men,_  
_stole the Queen from her bed_  
_and bound her in her bones._  
_Yo ho, all hands_  
_Hoist the colours high._

War was the wind that battered the coast. The tide rose, fierce and unnatural, as a Castle stealing the heart of us and binding it to her. Plague was the clouds that smudged the stars of the constellation of Delphinus. 

I bent to gather the fallen blossoms. _Storge_ was the love of a man for his family. Upon mourning's verdure, upon yew's eternal sweep, remained the hawthorn. 

It was time to hoist the colours. 


End file.
